Smallholder Farmers Alliance Blog

Close to half of all farmers throughout the developing world are women, but gender alone denies them equal access to resources. Given the right support, smallholder women farmers will take a leading role in transforming global agriculture and achieving food security. I explore this premise in “Half the Sky, Half the Land,” an illustrated version of the talk I gave at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto last November. Please check it out by clicking on the image above.

Columbia students from top clockwise: Hyo Jin Kim, Jimmy Lee, Numwa Srimontha, Nitin Maginaand Ran Ma next to SFA agronomist Joseph Piterson (right) gathering data from a Haitian farmerusing the new app on a tablet.

by Hugh Locke and Atlanta McIlwraith

Five Columbia University students who hail from China, India, South Korea and Thailand deserve the designation ‘digital champions’ for designing a revolutionary new app to help smallholder farmers in Haiti, and eventually other parts of the world. What makes this app so unique is that it is designed to help small-scale family farmers become more productive at the same time as measuring the precise impact of each farmers’ crops on increasing food security, improving the status of women, and combatting climate change.

In partnership with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) we are on a five-year mission to bring cotton farming back to Haiti, an initiative that will create significant growth opportunities for Haiti and its communities and plant millions of trees in the process. We recently sent a team of people down to Haiti to help with the first commercial cotton harvest the country had seen in 30 years. Let’s hear a first-hand experience from our very own employee, Allison Spahr.

Trees talk and share resources right under our feet, using a fungal network nicknamed the Wood Wide Web. Some plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack it to sabotage their rivals.

Last week three representatives of global outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland joined smallholder farmers in Haiti to pick cotton as part of Haiti's' first commercial cotton harvest in 30 years. Since 2016, Timberland has partnered with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) on an initiative to reintroduce cotton farming -- once the country's fourth-largest export crop -- to Haiti. The recent harvest was a key milestone in the project, which aims to create a new sustainable supply chain of organically grown cotton while simultaneously providing social and environmental benefits to Haitian farm communities.

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, December 20, 2018 – A study released today draws on the recent reintroduction of cotton to Haiti by the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) as the basis for mapping out a similar scenario for Puerto Rico. Both countries share a history of cotton production that has been halted for generations, and both countries have a tradition of small-scale family farming in need of revitalization. Hurricane Maria in 2017 was particularly devastating to Puerto Rico’s smallholder farmers, and a coalition of local organizations there approached the SFA to share its sustainable smallholder-grown cotton expertise to help with the recovery efforts. The Puerto Rico Cotton Study: Exploring a Smallholder-based Organic Cotton Supply Chain is the result of a collaboration led jointly by the SFA and Visit Rico, with support from Textile Exchange and members of Armonía en la Montaña, an educational non-profit organization in Puerto Rico, and the Mercado Agrícola Natural Viejo San Juan.

Atlanta McIlwraith accepting the US Chamber of Commerce Citizenship Award on behalf of Timberland,accompanied by Hugh Locke from the Smallholder Farmers Alliance.

Timberland’s work to reintroduce cotton farming to Haiti was honored recently with the US Chamber of Commerce Citizenship Award for the Best Economic Empowerment Program. In partnership with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA), the global outdoor global lifestyle brand aims to create a new supply chain for sustainable cotton for use in its products through a program that will also contribute to reforesting Haiti and improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Over the next five years, the program will plant 25 million trees and engage 34,000 Haitian smallholder farmers to produce 10 to 15 million pounds of organic cotton lint annually.

Haiti is severely deforested and the lack of tree cover reduces agricultural productivity, raises average temperatures and makes rural areas more susceptible to flooding.

Some 70% of Haiti’s energy comes from burning wood and charcoal, which means that trees in Haiti are worth more dead than alive. Low agricultural productivity leads many of Haiti’s more than one million smallholder farmers to take up producing charcoal to supplement their low incomes, ensuring that the causal link between deforestation and rural poverty continues unabated.